The 888 Inner Artist Initiative — October 2023 Update

Last month, we hinted that changes were coming to the 888 Inner Artist Initiative.

In October, we continued to institute some of those changes.

The most important change was that our budget for our weekly celebration of art was reduced from 1 ETH/week to 0.2888 ETH/week. However, what has not changed is our commitment to purchase art from emerging artists every week.

Please note that we are NOT requiring artists to price their art under 0.2888 ETH. As was the case before, artists can price their work at any price they choose and participate in our weekly event for visibility and exposure. It is just that in the phase 4 purchase phase (phases 1–4 previously mentioned here), the Team will filter out pieces priced above 0.2888 ETH as being ineligible for purchase. This is similar to how we currently filter out pieces without a “buy now” price as being ineligible for purchase.

Here are the reasons we made this change:

• Fiscal responsibility: Changing the weekly budget to 0.2888 ETH per week allows us to stretch our overall budget and extend the runway for our funds.
• Alignment with market: Our goal is to support emerging artists. We have learned that most emerging artists do not price their work for more than 0.2888 ETH anyways. Rather than creating a sales aberration for an emerging artist, we want to help them grow organically and naturally.
• Reduce “gaming of our system”: It was brought to our attention that some artists may have been tempted to “game” our previous system by artificially increasing their prices just for our event. Again, we want to help artists grow organically and naturally.
• Benefiting more artists: We can support more than 3x as many artists with a 0.2888 ETH weekly budget than we could with our previous budget.
• Space to pursue other endeavors: Our weekly purchase of art is only one thing we do to support artists (as seen with our recent Gallery partnership in Barcelona). Being fiscally responsible with our weekly event budget allows us more leeway to explore new opportunities for our artists.

So far, the support we’ve received from our artists for this change has been positive and supportive. Many members of our community are excited that we will now be able to support more artists.

We also continued with the changes to our phase 2 curation policy that we started working on last month. We previously discussed with our artists their preferred mode of curation, and we got several different answers. Some wanted curation to be done by Verified Inner Artists, in order to include artists’ expertise. Others wanted the curation to be done by non-artists, in order to reduce artist bias. Others wanted to entrust the curation process to the IAI Team. Still others wanted the curation process to be randomized, using tools such as ChatGPT.

Currently, we’ve decided on a hybrid approach, where we incorporate aspects of all the different feedback. Every week, we will strive to curate a total of 24 pieces. Eight picks will be from a Verified Inner Artist guest curator (which will change every week). Eight picks will be from an Inner 8 guest curator (which will change every week). And eight picks will be from a combination of IAI Team picks and ChatGPT (for example, the IAI Team might collectively give 24 or more picks and then ChatGPT could then be used to narrow that number down to eight). The process is still in flux and subject to small changes from week to week, but we’ve established this as a successful template to build on.

This month, we also held our first community Twitter Spaces with our Verified Inner Artists, in order to spotlight our artists that displayed in Barcelona. One of the other changes we hope to make in the next year is an increased effort in helping to market our artists and their work. This Twitter Spaces was, in a sense, a test to explore possible ways that we can better support our artists. We were pleased with the turnout and hope to do more Spaces in the future.

Finally, the most significant internal action this month was that the IAI Team convened to discuss our plans for the next year. A lot was discussed, and we hope to reveal more when the time is right.

Weekly Celebration of Art

Here is the art that we purchased in the month of October.

Week 59

My peak of silence by @BYViktor86

Week 60

Carpenters Lake House by @Pontes_NFT

Week 61

So close yet so far! by @IjlalAslam

Week 62

Reincarnation! by @mab_369 (animated)

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As a reminder, the 888 Inner Artist Initiative is not just a single program. Rather, it is a comprehensive and ever-increasing set of efforts and endeavors designed to celebrate, empower, and support artists. Our goal is to meet the various needs of various artists, in a wide variety of ways, wherever they may be on their artistic journey.

For more information, please join our Discord server, follow our Twitter, and view our Medium. Also, as a reminder, if you are an artist, we encourage you to apply to become a Verified Inner Artist. No token purchase is necessary, but you will need to join our Server and be verified as a community member (by going to our verify-to-access-server channel) in order to receive the role.